AMD officially announces their new Ryzen CPU

AMD officially announces their new Ryzen CPU

AMD officially announces their new Ryzen CPU

It is official, Ryzen will be coming in Q1 2017, finally bringing some competition to the high-end x86 CPU market. Tonight AMD has showcased their first Zen-based CPU, Ryzen, coming in with 8 CPU cores, 16 threads, 20MB of L2+L3 cache and clock speeds of 3.4GHz and above.

AMD's CEO, Dr Lisa Su, announced at the start of the event that AMD had "met or exceeded our goals" with their new CPU architecture, stating that they have a 40%+ IPC gain when compared to their previous generation hardware.

This means that AMD's Zen CPUs are set to be highly competitive with Intel's current offerings, placing AMD in a great position to gain some market share in 2017.

Regardless of whether you are a fan of AMD or Intel, you should be rooting for AMD's success in 2017 as a competitive AMD gives Intel march forward with a new architecture of their own or at a minimum reduce the pricing of their high-end CPU lineup.

Many of us will remember AMD's 1090T on the AM3 platform, a 6-core performance monster which delivered some serious performance at a reasonable price point. This was arguably the last highly competitive CPU that AMD has ever released, prompting Intel in the following year to release their Sandy-Bridge series of CPUs, which was one of the largest performance leaps that Intel has ever achieved in a single generation.

A strong AMD with a competitive series of products will help to push the market forward, forcing their competition to focus on bringing more powerful products to market. On the GPU side, we know that Nvidia could create a GTX 1080Ti GPU using their GP102 GPU core, but right now Nvidia simply doesn't need to until AMD has released something to compete with the GTX 1080.

AMD has designed their Ryzen CPUs to be smarter and more refined than their previous generation CPUs, with an increased focus on energy efficiency, clock speed control and smarter caching, allowing Zen CPUs to offer enhanced performance with lower power consumption than its previous generation equivalents.

At their event, AMD's Ryzen based system in their Blender demonstration was consuming 188 watts of power, while the competing Intel X99 i7 6900K system was consuming 191 watts, giving both systems very similar power draws.

In both Blender and Handbrake AMD's Ryzen powered system performed very similarly to their Intel i7 6900K competing system, with both finishing their blender runs in almost identical times and AMD's Ryzen system finishing 5 seconds before Intel in Handbrake.

With Zen AMD wants to reward those that use "enthusiast cooling" solutions, creating what they call Extended Frequency Range (XFR), which allows AMD's Ryzen CPUs to use enhanced clock speeds which move beyond Zen's traditional clock speed limits without the need for users to manually overclock their CPUs.

This effectively allows AMD's Ryzen CPUs to overclock themselves when using aftermarket cooling solutions, though at this time we do not know how high AMD's Ryzen CPUs will overclock, either automatically through XFR or manually using traditional methods.

At this time, AMD has not revealed how their XFR technology works, though we expect that it will act in a similar way to Nvidia's GPU boost technology, increasing the CPU's boost clock when under the right loads.

This will mean that those with high-end CPU coolers will be able to maintain higher boost clock speeds for longer periods of time. At this time we do not know how far AMD's Ryzen CPUs will boost their clock speeds on their own, though it is unlikely that XFR will replace manual overclocking.

AMD has also shared some details on their AM4 platform, stating that they will have a modern feature set with plenty of expandability. AM4 motherboards will support DDR4 memory, PCIe Gen 3, native USB 3.1 and NVMe storage.

AMD's AM4 platform will support both AMD's Zen-based Ryzen CPUs and their Bristol Ridge APUs, allowing this motherboard platform to function with both high-end and low-end AMD hardware.

At the end of AMD's New Horizon Event the company showcased their 8-core Ryzen CPU playing Star Wars: Battlefront at 4K 60+Hz using an AMD Vega-based GPU.

Right now AMD has not released any more information on their future Vega-series GPUs, though we expect to hear more soon at CES 2017.

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